‘Queen Hillary’

More than a month remains until President Barack Obama’s corporate-financed second inaugural, but he is already yesterday’s news. There are political battles to be fought and budgets to pass (or not pass) and most likely wars to wage and natural disasters to endure before the country elects its next president. But all of this is a sideshow to the chatterers and scribblers who are busy currying favor with the liberal establishment. The real story, we learn from our newspapers and magazines and blogs and television specials, is whether the current secretary of state will run for president in 2016.

“Hillary is running,” gushed the editor of the New Yorker on Dec. 2. He’d just attended the Saban Forum, a conference on Middle East policy put on by a Democratic mega-donor whose wife just happened to be appointed a representative to the U.N. General Assembly in September. Clinton’s speech was preceded by a biographical video that seemed to David Remnick like “an international endorsement four years in advance of the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary.” He compared it to “the sort of film that the Central Committee of the Communist Party might have produced for Leonid Brezhnev’s retirement party.” The crowd loved it.

So did the film’s subject, who joked she wanted to watch the movie again and count her various hairstyles over the years. “An old joke with Hillary,” notes Remnick—he and the former first lady must be on a first name basis—“but the crowd, tickled to be there, rosy with wine, roared.”

That I do not doubt. Indeed one cannot help noticing the blend of obsequiousness, obsession, insularity, and anticipation with which the political class treats the question of Hillary Clinton’s future.